Water words: Cultural memory, conservation, and environmental discourse in Saudi school texts

Abstract

Water enters school knowledge as more than a chemical substance or a finite utility. It also carries inherited narratives, moral obligations, memories of place, and expectations about the relation between citizens and the state. This article examines how these meanings are assembled in a contrastive micro-corpus of three water-focused units from Saudi national primary textbooks issued for the 1446/2024 school year: Grade 4 Islamic Studies, Grade 4 Science, and Grade 5 Social Studies. The corpus comprises 15 textbook pages, including expository prose, scriptural citations, photographs, diagrams, activities, and assessment prompts. A memory-sensitive critical ecolinguistic analysis combines cultural-memory theory with categories of framing, evaluation, salience, erasure, legitimation, and agency. The analysis finds a layered civic ecology. Islamic Studies presents water as divine blessing, purifying substance, and object of restraint modelled through a remembered Prophetic measure. Science translates scarcity into observation, calculation, domestic repair, and persuasive communication. Social Studies frames aridity through national territory, depleted springs, and state-led desalination and wastewater treatment. Across subjects, Qurʾanic language links cosmological value to practical conservation, while named landscapes and infrastructures place water within a national story. The resulting discourse is ethically resonant and unusually actionable at the household scale. Yet it allocates responsibility unevenly: the child and family receive detailed duties, the state appears chiefly as provider and problem-solver, and agricultural demand, desalination externalities, distributional questions, and climate change remain largely absent. Cultural memory therefore works as both bridge and boundary. It can connect faith, place, and sustainable conduct, but it requires systemic inquiry if conservation education is to develop action competence rather than compliant thrift alone.